MOBY - Destroyed

For many, quite a lot in fact, Moby is an artist who flirts with the banal, who falls prey to the perverse allure of "the shortest path", of easy characterization at the expense of brave and truly personal choices. This attitude, from "Play" onwards, has led him to forge electronic music that's hard to pin down, but always entangled in pop frameworks, pseudo-soul leanings and improbable blues forays.

If "Destroyed" doesn't sound fresh and innovative, the reason — let's not beat around the bush — is simply that it isn't. Let's be clear: the compositional effort is that of a seasoned DJ who knows exactly how an album needs to sound in order to sell, who manages to dose his own inspiration so as not to end up too far one way (ringtone music) nor too far the other, where a niche audience would box him into contexts in which, frankly, the man from Harlem wouldn't feel at ease.

And yet the virtue of "Destroyed" lies once again in the musical syncretism that tracks like "Stella Maris" or "The Right Thing" unfurl through gentle digital strokes, beneath which lurk references to Philip Glass, Mike Oldfield and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The merit, the enormous merit, is that it all undeniably sounds "Moby", and the breakbeat and strings are there to prove that, once a heterogeneous structure is made uniform by the strong personality of whoever assembles it, the final product, good or not, is still worth noting.

An album strongly inspired by insomnia, by travel, by solitude and by silence. Four synonyms for a single word: inspiration. The same inspiration that touches every single track of a work that turns out to be markedly and obviously more intimate than its predecessors.

The atmospheres have expanded to make room for a work that is the natural evolution of a melancholy album like "Wait For Me", in which the more strictly commercial spirit lingered behind atmospheres that nonetheless lacked any truly noteworthy sparks, but which had the merit of clearly and decisively defining the state of inspiration of the New York musician.

"Destroyed" carries on along the same wavelength and shows us a Moby at peace with himself, who no longer has (if he ever did) any experimental ambitions. It's the album of a producer who moonlights as a DJ, rather than the other way around. An album we won't remember in 20 years, but we can't hold that against someone who, knowingly or not, shaped the previous decade in a subtle and skillful way. Dosing, mediating, evolving.

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27/06/2011